TheMachine

For advanced economies, such imbalances would likely lead to more long- term and permanent joblessness. More young people without post-secondary training would fail to get a start in the job market and older workers would drop out because they don't qualify for jobs that are being created. The polarization of incomes between high- and low-skill workers could become even more pronounced, slowing the advance in national living standards, and increasing public-sector burdens and social tensions. In some advanced economies, less-skilled workers could very well grow up poorer than their parents, in real terms.

I'd always intended to talk about The New Aesthetic, but up until about the day before I didn't really know how. The original title of the talk was "The Robot-Readable World", but this didn't really sit right with me; it's one aspect of NA, for sure, but there was something else I wanted to emphasise: the human aspects and emotions of NA, and the becoming-human of the machines.

"n a recent Wall Street Journal interview about college costs and online learning, Stanford University President John Hennessy said, "What I told my colleagues is there's a tsunami coming. I can't tell you exactly how it's going to break, but my goal is to try to surf it, not to just stand there." "

Over the last year I've reviewed several ~1900 era future dystopias, such as Metropolis, We, and Pictures of the Socialist Future. I wanted to see fears of the industrial revolution, from an era when that revolution was still young enough for people could see things from a farmer era point of view, and yet old enough that people had some idea of where the revolution was going.

The Chicago Fed examines the evidence and says: we find limited evidence of skills mismatch They do find a few places where a mismatch might be present, but this is not the problem in most sectors (it's lack of demand). [via David Wessel]

Canon Inc. is moving toward fully automating digital camera production in an effort to cut costs - a key change being played out across Japan, a world leader in robotics.

n a forceful, hard-hitting policy brief, Executive Director Ann Mettler and Senior Fellow Anthony Williams look at the deep-seated changes afoot in our economy.

Thirty years ago, when John Naisbitt was writing Megatrends, his prescient vision of America's future, he used a simple yet powerful tool to spot new ideas that were bubbling in the zeitgeist: the newspaper. 

Overcoming spinal cord injuries (I learned a lot about the spinal cord from the first segment, e.g. the systems that control walking are at the base of the spinal column, the brain has little to do with it), remote brain controlled mechanical hands, self-directed robots, and so on:

The robotic future is here, and it looks nothing like we thought it would. Instead of humanoid, highly-intelligent robots that do our bidding, the future is increasingly one of robotic swarms, robotic quadrotors, and tiny robots no larger than insects that perform surgery.

Situated Technologies, a project by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, is a co-production of the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), and the Architectural League of New York.

Dixit on 'the 21st Century's Economic Hurricane', by New Economist: Princeton emeritus professor Avinash Dixit is always worth reading, even when he is speculating about the economy over the next hundred years. Likening economic forecasting to weather forecasting (plenty of caveats and uncertainty), his approach is suitably skeptical. Here's how he kicks off:

The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made-and change the politics of jobs too

I can take a photo of a check and deposit it in my bank account, then turn around and find a new book through a Twitter link and buy it, all while being surveilled by a drone in Afghanistan and keeping track of how many steps I've walked. The question is, as it has always been: now what?

The rise of social platforms and content sharing is driving a major shift in the media industry. Increasingly, people are getting ALL their media through the social web: cute animals, breaking news, personal updates, branded content, humor, jokes, music and entertainment are all mixed together in a single interface.

I just read a fascinating book by Douglas W. Allen, The Institutional Revolution, which attempts to explain England's transition from its apparently illogical early-modern institutions - aristocracy, purchased army commissions, lighthouses, private roads, even dueling - to modern institutions. And today, we see many of those institutions challenged.